A new article involving WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has been published on developerWorks. Titled "SOA governance using WebSphere DataPower and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, Part 3: Enforcing Service Level Agreements in Web Services". The article covers using the new WS-MediationPolicy capabilities in WSRR to create Service Level Agreements which can be enforced on a DataPower appliance.

Starting with the releases of IBM® WebSphere® DataPower firmware V5.0 and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository V8.0, IT service developers and policy administrators can now attach and affect Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) behavior related to Service Level Management routing. Part 3 of this article series describes how to use the new WS-MediationPolicy capabilities in WSRR to author specific Service Level Agreements, which you can enforce on the DataPower appliance without manually creating the XSLT or processing rules and actions.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) 7.5 fixpack 3 is now released. This fix pack brings various benefits:

Subscribe to changes in objects directly from the UI

Fixes for working with Tivoli WebSEAL

General service fixes

I'll talk about the subscription feature. This allows a user to create an email subscription to certain items from the Business Space UI, for certain activities such as deletion, update or transition. Additionally the user can choose from a list of transitions to be told about. Finally the user can see all their subscriptions and edit them.

It is worth stating that by default, this feature is not turned on. So if you want the subscriptions menus, you will need to edit the Business Space configuration to enable them. See the infocenter pages for Actions widget and Details widget for how to do this.

The email that is sent to them can contain a description of the transition that happened, and can be different depending on the role of the user who subscribed, so a business user can get one type of email and a developer can have a different email layout and content sent to them. Finally the email can contain a link to the Business Space UI, to a particular Space, to show details of the object that the email notification is being sent about.

On the detail view of an object, there is now a Subscribe option in the menu.

Clicking this opens the Subscribe dialog, where you can select various things to be told about.

Things such as the email address to send to (or a list separated by commas), what things happen to the object to make the notification, and which transitions from the available list. If you already have a subscription, the email address from that is put into the email field so you don't need to keep on re-typing your email. Very useful and a real time saver.

Once you have subscribed to an item, the Actions menu then shows Manage Subscriptions instead.

This opens the Manage Subscriptions dialog for that object, showing you which subs you have and letting you delete them, or make a new one.

Here you see the Create a subscription button will pop up the subscribe dialog, with the email address pre-populated with the address from the latest subscription. Edit will pop up the dialog again and let you edit an existing subscription. Delete will delete the subscription in an unsurprising manner. In the above shot, a new subscription has been created and so now two are shown.

You can add an action to the Actions widget to show all the user's subscriptions, for example on the main page of a Space:

Above I added "My Subscriptions" although the label can be whatever you want. This action will launch the Manage Subscriptions dialog, but for all the user's subscriptions:

Here we can see all my subscriptions, to 3 different objects. Again you can delete or edit each subscription, but you can't make any new subscriptions because there isn't an object in context to subscribe to.

So how can your friendly neighbourhood WSRR administrator set the subscriptions up? They can select which objects users are allowed to subscribe to and which particular transitions they can subscribe to. All this is done from the detail widget configuration panel:

There is now a handy Subscriptions tab for each and every type, where subscriptions can be enabled and those transitions can be selected. This configuration is for a particular Space, or actually a Business Space Configuration which is ideally used by just one Space. To add the My Subscriptions Action, that's done from the Actions widget configuration.

On the WSRR profile side, it's possible to load a special file which maps the role of a subscriber to a particular email template, so your administrator can say Business users get the EMailTemplate.Business template, for example. You can also now load multiple email templates. Finally the template can contain the transition name and a link to the Business Space UI which will open the notified item in the Browse page.

This article shows you how to use subscription objects and the
notification service in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. A
sample application shows you how to cycle a subscription object
through its Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) life cycle.

I have started working on a new article for developerWorks with another developer which, hopefully, will fill a much needed gap in our published documentation.